I am very interested in Mixed or Cross Reality advances at the moment. Over the past 6 months there have been some great trials and even a few commercial enterprises set up including Total Immersion. But a couple of trials caught our attention in the last couple of weeks. The first (virtual into real) in the YouTube below, from the Georgia Institute of Technology who have managed to get a complete real time Second Life scene running on a real world table top (of course through a camera lens!).

The second is the other way around. Bringing the real into the virtual – a really cool ‘installation’ from The Creative Technology Dept. at The University of Salford who have managed to layer the real world into Second Life (again!) then broadcast the result back into the busy park in Manchester. You can see the results of that in this short documentary video and read more on Paul Sermon’s project page, Liberate Your Avatar. I think the potential for collaborative games in a composited (vs parallel) mix of locative and virtual worlds is really exciting. Roll on those Cross/Augmented/Virtual/Locative/Alternate Reality games!